Aliens, Insects and Arachnids: A Menagerie of Strange Creatures

As the title of this article makes clear, it deals with some very strange extraterrestrial entities. The weirdest account I have on file - and that falls into this particular category - comes from Houston, Texas. The witness (or "victim" might be a more accurate description) was a woman named Marilyn. She told me of her encounter with a "Gray"-type alien back in the winter of 1977. Her account of alien abduction was very much like so many others that have become staple parts of Ufology: she was subjected to medical experiments and blood was removed from her. What sets Marilyn's story apart from many others, however, is the fact that while Marilyn was on a cold, metal table on-board a UFO, one of the Grays took out of a box and placed onto her stomach. To her horror it was something that looked like a large spider, but with far more more legs than normal for a spider. It was like something out of a horror movie: the thing crawled up her body, onto her face, and inserted one its spindly legs into her right nostril. For a moment there was a flash of pain. Then, nothing, except that Marilyn suddenly found herself back in her car that she had been abducted from, hours earlier. Now, let's move onto another creature.

Over at Gaia.com, there is the following: "By far the most striking aspect of the Mantis alien is its physical kinship with the praying mantis, the carnivorous and bipedal insect of its namesake. Many report these beings as 6-7 feet tall, with long, thin torsos. Their necks, arms and hands have additional joints. Their heads are insect-like and triangular, with large, slanted eyes of deep brown to black....By far the most striking aspect of the Mantis alien is its physical kinship with the praying mantis, the carnivorous and bipedal insect of its namesake. Many report these beings as 6-7 feet tall, with long, thin torsos. Their necks, arms and hands have additional joints. Their heads are insect-like and triangular, with large, slanted eyes of deep brown to black." Now, it's time to make a trip to New Mexico.

Is it possible that the southwest region of the United States is home to giant-sized insects – living deep underground - that feed upon us, the human race? Such a thing sounds not just unlikely and incredible, but just like the kind of scenario presented in the classic 1954, sci-fi move, Them! It’s a movie in which massive, radioactive ants terrorize and slaughter the people of a small New Mexico town, and threaten to do likewise to not just the rest of the country, but to the entire planet, too. Which brings us to an important question: might truth be stranger than fiction? Yes, just possibly.

Danielle B. is a woman who, for a number of years, lived in the New Mexican town of Aztec – which, just like the far more famous New Mexican town of Roswell, has a crashed UFO legend attached to it. It’s a legend which dates back to March 1948, when, reportedly, a near-intact flying saucer and its crew of diminutive dead pilots were found. But, according to Danielle, she encountered something far stranger at Aztec than deceased extraterrestrial dwarfs and a wrecked flying saucer. It was on one particular day in May 2004 that Danielle decided to spend a few hours hanging out in Aztec’s Hart Canyon – which, curiously enough, is exactly where the alleged UFO is said to have fallen to earth, back in the 1940s. It was also where Danielle had an encounter with something far worse than aliens. On what was a warm and sunny day, Danielle found a place to sit, where she could read a book, and have her snacks and drinks at hand. It was a perfect way to spend a day off work. Or, for a while it was, at least.

All was normal for a couple of hours. That is, until Danielle noticed a small, black helicopter approaching her in the distance. Far more correctly, she assumed that it was a helicopter. Certainly, at a distance that’s what it appeared to be. But it was no normal helicopter: there was no “thud-thud” sound that one associates with the fast-moving blades of a helicopter. And, on top of that, it appeared to be carrying below it a small calf, held tightly in place by thick ropes! Most definitely not the kind of thing you see every day. When the helicopter got close to Hart Canyon, however, Danielle could see that the helicopter was actually nothing of the sort. It was a large, obscene-looking insect of around four meters in length. The presumed rotor-blades of the helicopter were actually the fast-beating wings of the monster-creature. As for those ropes, they were nothing less than powerful-looking black limbs. Danielle could only stare – in a mixture of awe, fascination, fear, and horror – as the huge creature flew overhead, dropped the poor calf on a nearby peak, and then swooped to the ground with frightening speed, pounced on the animal, and viciously tore into it. In less than half an hour the giant insect was done with its feasting and took to the skies. Now, we come to the final, creepy tale.

For twelve years Denise Stoner did back ground investigations for the U.S. military on recruits seeking highly classified clearances for work on nuclear submarines. Prior to retirement, Denise moved to the Naval Air Warfare Center, Training Systems Division, military research facility where she was the training coordinator for several hundred military and civilian employees. In 2018, Denise told me of how one day she was shopping in a Florida store when something very strange happened. In Denise's own words: "[We] were in the back of the store in a center aisle. There were some areas to my right with stands of items for sale with small aisles between. I looked up the aisle and spotted an elderly man in one of those electric chairs, moving slowly toward me on the other side of the sale case. In front of him was a woman about six- feet tall, wearing shorts just above her knees that were a bright shiny material and pink."

This is where it gets really strange, as Denise explains: "I looked up to see that her head was very abnormal - shaped just like that of an insectoid [italics mine] and she had placed a white wig on top of it, but the skull was sticking out. I could not believe what I was seeing. Her eyes were huge and black and tipped at an angle, more so than a Gray. " Denise continued that the woman had "...what appeared to be black eyeliner and drew huge squares above and below the enormous eyes. This did no good at all in hiding what [her eyes] were and made her more than freakish. She had two lines for a nose and from there the whole face dropped down like skin falling to just above the collarbone. There were bright red mandibles at the lower portion. She was staring at me. Between us stood a lady with brown hair to her shoulders. She observed my face and turned to her right to see what I was looking at. [She] immediately looked totally shocked. The very strange thing here was, my husband did not see this at all..."